Printing a Calendar or Diary from ASP.NET Application

Question

We have an ASP.NET application that uses the Infragistics WebSchedule control to display appointments etc in the same manner as Outlook. The problem we have is that the customer wants to be able to print the page as it appears on the screen - which the control itself does not appear to support directly.

We have developed a Crystal Report that does a fair job but it is pretty complicated and just a little bit flaky (it does not stretch to accommodate all of the appointments for a particular day so if there are too many then they spill over). Bascially we have bullied Crystal to doing something it is not really meant to do - render a graphical representation of a diary rather than list the data in a tabular manner.

Does anyone have a better alternative to this?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Well in the end I decided to junk the Crystal Report in this instance. It's fine for tabular data and graph data but not really suitable for a graphical representation of a diary/scheduler.

I opted for an XML/XSLT solution which has turned out better than I expected - especially in terms of speed.

I was able to generate an XML stream and depending on the date range feed it to a suitable XSL template which produced a Weekly or Monthly view of the report. A colleague sprinkled some CSS over it and we're sorted.

Answer 2

DayPilot Pro (our product) supports PNG export that allows easy calendar/schedule printing (almost a pixel-by-pixel copy of the HTML control).

It's working for both the Calendar (traditional Outlook-like day/week view):

http://www.daypilot.org/demo/Calendar/

and for the Scheduler (showing a time line for multiple resources):

http://www.daypilot.org/demo/Scheduler/

Try "Print/export" button below the controls.